Stephen Woolley, right, and colleagues outside the Scala in Kings Cross in 1981.
Photograph: David Babsky

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the start of the Scala cinema’s now-legendary repertory programme; as a 22-year old post-punk movie buff, I originated the rep ethos after being taken on in 1978 as programming manager of what was then a purpose-built 350-seat cinema in Charlotte Street in the West End of London. When we moved to Kings Cross in 1981, I became the co-owner, up until its closure in 1993. We specialised in the offbeat and the surreal, the transgressive and just plain freakish – and there has been nothing like it in Britain’s cinema world since.

The Scala: London's cinema temple to the offbeat and bizarre – in pictures

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Now we have a book about the Scala, compiled by another former programmer, Jane Giles, celebrating its sordid celluloid heritage. Reflecting on those halcyon years, from 1979-1993, I was prompted to recall David Hockney’s memories of going to the cinema in Bradford as a child. He would sneak in through the exit with his pals and always sat in the front row in fear of the usher’s torchlight. He then became immersed in the film. Years later, when he could afford to buy a ticket and entered from the back, he realised that the screen had hard sides, and that the universe he had become mesmerised by was not infinite. I think most of the Scala clientele were looking to dive into that fathomless immersion, releasing them into alternate, often transgressive, universes, where the pictures and images spoke louder than words, but were tinged with a vestige of guilty pleasure.

It’s hard to picture the cultural landscape of the London cinema scene in the 60s and 70s for a budding teenage cinephile. At the flick of a switch, almost all of the films we showed are now available to download, but when the Scala began as a repertory cinema in earnest in 1979, such accessibility to this visual treasure trove was unimaginable.

Living in London, the benefit of Time Out – not the free handout it has become, but the indispensable cultural barometer it once was – cannot be overstressed. From the moment it was launched in 1968, Time Out became the guide for all Londoners interested in the arts, and many of those film critics went on to be film practitioners. Without the internet and with so little coverage of film in national newspapers, a few well-chosen words in Time Out could mean the difference between an empty or full cinema.

But to experience their recommendations was often a journey across the width and breadth of the metropolis. Each cinema had an idiosyncratic identity that also disguised an inverted snobbery. The Electric on Portobello Road showed Siegel, Fuller and Borowczyk movies but never any “trash”. The Everyman in Hampstead showed Douglas Sirk films and cosier seasons of art movies. The Academy on Oxford Street had a steady diet of classic European features, from Buñuel to Renoir. The ICA on the Mall showed third-world movies and, controversially, Andy Warhol films. The London Film-Makers’ Co-op, in the backwaters of Camden, showed avant garde and experimental films. The Starlight Club in the Mayfair Hotel showed exclusively Hollywood classics and musical comedies from the 30s and 40s. The Classic Cinema chain showed all-night Hammer horror films of the X certificate variety on Friday and Saturday nights in Notting Hill, Victoria and the Haymarket. The Rex Cinema in Islington showed double-bills of movies that nobody else wanted to show, and when it became the Screen on the Green in the early 1970s, specialised in American “alternative cinema” from the period.

Most of the 35mm prints these cinemas showed were eviscerated by the censors, worn out, tatty and likely to implode and burn in the rickety old projectors that were screening them. At the National Film Theatre in Waterloo, with access to the BFI archive, seasons of films would be presented, often uncut, such as the entire existing Bergman oeuvre. But the individual films would be shown once or twice only and if you didn’t catch it then, with no recourse to television, VHS, DVD or download, the opportunity to see that obscure Bergman would not happen again for another six or seven years.

Cinema of sin: London's old Scala picturehouse

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The insane ambition of the Scala cinema was to try and distil the best of those idiosyncratic cinemas into one gigantic smorgasbord, a celebratory movie digest with the addition of music, performance and a healthy disregard for censorship of any kind. When I look back at the programme I produced in June 1979, for example, I realise that all of the ingredients are there as a blueprint for the future, from Klaus Kinski rubbing shoulders with John Wayne, Judy Garland linking hands with Toshiro Mifune, and Rock Rock Rock! sharing time with The Battle of Chile. In my career as a film producer, I still get inspiration from the Scala’s programming. For instance, in the first all-nighter of June 1979, we showed Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). Nearly 40 years on from that Scala screening, I’m reading a screenplay for a version I commissioned that will be set in 1950s London, and which I hope to shoot next year.

The films that were shown at the Scala and the cinema itself continue to be an inspiration for the film-makers who passed through the doors. For most audiences, however, it created a private space for them, collectively and individually, to indulge their fantasies and become part of a cinematic experience that embraced like-minded freaks. Like a chameleon, the Scala was a beacon of camaraderie and companionship for lovers of Laurel and Hardy and Fassbinder alike. While the experience of watching movies was perhaps a personal relationship between the film and the individual audience member, watching the silly grins on the faces of The Prisoner fan club – Six of One – after the last ever episode was screened, or the B-movie western fans doffing their Stetsons’ after marathon screenings, was joyous. I think in my mind, the real pleasure of being part of the Scala was imagining that people would make the journey across London to see a Clint Eastwood all-nighter, and then perhaps return for a screening of Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour.

Beyond B-movies: Recreating The Scala's movie mecca

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The demise of the Scala cinema was inevitable in the face of today’s access to so many movies, perfectly preserved and in so many different formats, and its rebirth impossible and arguably unnecessary – other than in the pop-up Scalarama version that now seems to be an annual event. More importantly, those guilty pleasures have become mainstream entertainment. Thirty-five years ago, Three Billboards, Call Me By Your Name and The Shape of Water would have been regarded as cult films – Scala classics. The truth is though, for most people in Britain, movies were just the flicks.

It’s just that some, like the Scala audiences and David Hockney, were looking a bit harder than others.